4 ms·

NBA Highlights – Search for video of NBA plays

102 points by Matetricks 10y ago

lintroller 10y ago
This is a fascinating tool but I can't imagine this will exist much longer after the NBA's lawyers find it.
- shigawire 10y ago
  The NBA is usually pretty good about letting fan videos of their content exist.. compared to the NFL at least. Also videos of every play are available as clips on the NBA site, this just seems like a more searchable version.
- rockostrich 10y ago
  I'm not sure they're doing anything wrong. They're just using data from the NBA's public sitemap. The videos are served by the NBA themselves.
nodesocket 10y ago
I'm a big basketball fan (mostly college). Where are you sourcing the videos? Also, are you manually tagging each video with player names, teams, and keywords or is there some magic happening on the backend?
- slyfocks 10y ago
  Just from a cursory glance at the results, it seems like they're simply providing a naive search on the play-by-play descriptions that the NBA provides (e.g. http://data.nba.net/data/10s/prod/v1/20161212/0021600366_pbp_1.json http://data.nba.net/data/10s/prod/v1/20161212/0021600366_pbp...). No computer vision behind-the-scenes magic, unfortunately.
  - mistermann 10y ago
    > No computer vision behind-the-scenes magic, unfortunately. Theoretically, it shouldn't be terribly technically difficult to attach a few sensors to each player to get a relatively hi-res 3D representation of each player's position throughout the game, should it? Annotating the action accurately, not so easy, or might there be some trick?
    - forevercrashing 10y ago
      This sort of happens already in NBA games. There's a system called SportVU that tracks XY positioning of players and XYZ positioning of the ball in real-time. Here's a decent article that describes it in more detail: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670059/moneyball-20-how-missile-tracking-cameras-are-remaking-the-nba http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670059/moneyball-20-how-missile... . Unfortunately, the data is proprietary.
      - clairity 10y ago
        my impression, from having talked with people who analyze the data from sportVU, is that the raw data is fairly useless and most of the useful data crunching happens overnight after each game. with that said, bluetooth beacons, along with 3 bluetooth receivers for triangulation, could be used for inexpensive player tracking, but the data would be noisy and not as accurate (probably ~1 ft resolution or so). i've actually been wanting to put such a system together to determine how good it might be.
rlau26 10y ago
Where is all the footage from? Is this allowed by the NBA? The quality of the footage is quite good. This seems to be just searching the clip title. For example, if you search 'curry 3' ('curry three' returns nothing), it'll return things like "Curry 2' Finger Roll Layup (6 PTS) (Iguodala 3 AST)" or "Curry REBOUND (Off:0 Def:3)". If it could match the search query with play-by-play data, now THAT'd be cool.
- eaganr 10y ago
  My site (http://eaganr.com/nba/ http://eaganr.com/nba/) used to do this. But they changed up their video URLs, wondering how Matetricks gets the new URLs.
  - Matetricks 10y ago
    I didn't build this, it's a site that's been trending on my news feed. Two people in my network built it over a weekend.
    - mistermann 10y ago
      I would tell those 2 guys to build this out including parts that should be there but they need the data, etc, targeting it as a value-add service that Disney can sell to ESPN subscribers. Done properly with multiple sports over multiple years and consistent annotations, I would think sports fans would go nuts over this, wouldn't they? (Any sports fans here?) Like, think of the ability to jump immediately to the video of most any noteworthy event in a sports event in recent history - "hey, remember that time PlayerX did that funny fake tag out to PlayerY? Hey let's pull that up and watch it, grab this slider you can move it back and forth to see exactly how he pulled off that trick, hahaha awesome". I think Disney has plenty enough in-house talent and they're usually pretty forward thinking, it's surprising they haven't done something along these lines.
      - kareemm 10y ago
        I used to work at ESPN.com. My job application was a proof of concept of a similar idea, but because it was 2002 and wasn't possible to build technically it was designed to show that I could code and think creatively about consuming sports online. When I took the job, the realities of licensing footage hot hard: the leagues were not keen on letting a third party like ESPN have historical, searchable footage like this available on demand. The leagues were still figuring not how to make money from digital and rights to their games are the biggest asset they have. Things have changed since then but the tl; dr is that from 2002-2005 the reason this wasn't built by ESPN was not technical or due to a lack of imagination, but a business reason - it was prohibitively expensive / impossible to get licensing rights from the leagues.
djKianoosh 10y ago
cool stuff... every letter search becomes a new route.. yikes that is awful for going back also, I searched for ginobili assist but it found all plays with ginobili and any assist. good start and the video quality is pretty strong on mobile
derimagia 10y ago
For all the people asking where it's from, quick google brought up http://www.nba.com/sitemap_videos_0001.xml http://www.nba.com/sitemap_videos_0001.xml and changing it to 0002 seemed to work. It's just an index of something from nba.com and nothing is hosted on the site.
- shaunpud 10y ago
  You can get all the sitemaps here; http://www.nba.com/video_sitemap_index.xml http://www.nba.com/video_sitemap_index.xml
  - nlin5 10y ago
    How were you able to find that sitemap? Is there one for stats.nba.com?
    - shaunpud 10y ago
      Not sure mate, but you can find a bunch through G; https://www.google.com.au/search?q=inurl%3Axml+site%3Anba.com https://www.google.com.au/search?q=inurl%3Axml+site%3Anba.co...
failedstoic 10y ago
How I can find who made this? Would love to work w/ him/her on a project.
- krrishd 10y ago
  http://twitter.com/canzhiye http://twitter.com/canzhiye
  - DanFeldman 10y ago
    And by Zhi P
- 14sbhargava 10y ago
  also @notzhipan
rfrank 10y ago
I like the idea, but I'm having some trouble with it. Search results are only from this season, right? A search for Steve Nash showed a Steph Currey highlight as result one for me. More slang oriented searches like "dunked on" or "dunks on" don't really work either. Dunk/Dunks shows up in results, but nothing beyond that. Was looking for one of my all time favorite highlights, Baron Davis dunking on Kirilenko [1]. For me this type of thing would be pretty awesome with some sort of stats element. A 'visual box score' vs. 'highlights search engine.' ie show the box score for a game, and clicking in any particular field shows video of the plays that produced those stats. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYpwjB0IzoU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYpwjB0IzoU
- microtherion 10y ago
  > A search for Steve Nash showed a Steph Currey highlight as result one for me Presumably because Nash is on the warriors coaching staff.
  - rfrank 10y ago
    I can't find any retired players, maybe you can. Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, etc. Pretty sure it's just this year for results.
    - microtherion 10y ago
      I'm sure you're right, just meant to explain the connection between Nash & Curry.
LAMike 10y ago
Searched for "Kobe pass" 0 results lol
- rfrank 10y ago
  Would be pretty hilarious if the only result was the 81 point game.
prawn 10y ago
Would be great if it could learn which were most likely to be highlight plays based on the number of times they were clicked. And then give those priority in the results list. Also, maybe prioritise a player's involvement in the play. e.g., if I search "westbrook dunk", I probably don't want the normal dunks first, or the time he passed to someone else who then had the dunk. Show me the great Westbrook dunks first, then the normal ones, then the assists to other dunkers.
esturk 10y ago
Typed in "5x5", found nothing. However rare of a performance, Draymond pulled it off last season so it should be relatively recent.
- m_myers 10y ago
  This site appears to only have clips of individual plays, so neither a 5x5 nor a triple double would appear except as a long set of highlights. And not every play is a highlight; I checked a recent Russell Westbrook game and it had every assist but only about half of his scoring plays.
nodesocket 10y ago
I can't say for sure this is what 3ball is using, but here is an XML file from NBA.com listing videos with associated titles, descriptions, thmbnails, and video urls. http://www.nba.com/sitemap_videos_0001.xml http://www.nba.com/sitemap_videos_0001.xml However it appears outdated since the dates only go up to 8/4/2016.
laxatives 10y ago
I tried like 8 queries and none of them yielded a single relevant result. Most of them didn't yield a video at all. Granted, they were difficult/obscure, but didn't make a great impression. If this needs some special syntax or keywords, you should let the user know.
orthoganol 10y ago
"All NBA Plays"? For example, this well circulated failed dunk attempt by Curry from earlier this season is not there: https://streamable.com/mntc https://streamable.com/mntc
- alwayseasy 10y ago
  Found it. The queries have to match the naming of the video so I searched "Miss Curry Lakers": https://3ball.io/miss-curry-lakers/0021600238_233 https://3ball.io/miss-curry-lakers/0021600238_233
- rockostrich 10y ago
  It seems like it only included plays that create stats for players (with the occasional "missed" play). For example, for the Knicks-Kings game Brandon Jennings's half court and-one that was disallowed (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmzQS5XxkOs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmzQS5XxkOs) doesn't show up either.
pmontra 10y ago
If you search for a player's name and the word pass you get all the videos with that player and that word in the title. That includes the ones where the pass was made by somebody else and the ones marked as bad pass, which are probably not what I'm interested in. A suggestion: limit the search to the substring of the title between commas. It seems to always match a player with his play.

102 points by Matetricks 10y ago

lintroller 10y ago

This is a fascinating tool but I can't imagine this will exist much longer after the NBA's lawyers find it.

shigawire 10y ago
The NBA is usually pretty good about letting fan videos of their content exist.. compared to the NFL at least. Also videos of every play are available as clips on the NBA site, this just seems like a more searchable version.
rockostrich 10y ago
I'm not sure they're doing anything wrong. They're just using data from the NBA's public sitemap. The videos are served by the NBA themselves.

nodesocket 10y ago

I'm a big basketball fan (mostly college). Where are you sourcing the videos? Also, are you manually tagging each video with player names, teams, and keywords or is there some magic happening on the backend?

slyfocks 10y ago
Just from a cursory glance at the results, it seems like they're simply providing a naive search on the play-by-play descriptions that the NBA provides (e.g. http://data.nba.net/data/10s/prod/v1/20161212/0021600366_pbp_1.json http://data.nba.net/data/10s/prod/v1/20161212/0021600366_pbp...). No computer vision behind-the-scenes magic, unfortunately.
- mistermann 10y ago
  > No computer vision behind-the-scenes magic, unfortunately. Theoretically, it shouldn't be terribly technically difficult to attach a few sensors to each player to get a relatively hi-res 3D representation of each player's position throughout the game, should it? Annotating the action accurately, not so easy, or might there be some trick?
  - forevercrashing 10y ago
    This sort of happens already in NBA games. There's a system called SportVU that tracks XY positioning of players and XYZ positioning of the ball in real-time. Here's a decent article that describes it in more detail: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670059/moneyball-20-how-missile-tracking-cameras-are-remaking-the-nba http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670059/moneyball-20-how-missile... . Unfortunately, the data is proprietary.
    - clairity 10y ago
      my impression, from having talked with people who analyze the data from sportVU, is that the raw data is fairly useless and most of the useful data crunching happens overnight after each game. with that said, bluetooth beacons, along with 3 bluetooth receivers for triangulation, could be used for inexpensive player tracking, but the data would be noisy and not as accurate (probably ~1 ft resolution or so). i've actually been wanting to put such a system together to determine how good it might be.

rlau26 10y ago

Where is all the footage from? Is this allowed by the NBA? The quality of the footage is quite good. This seems to be just searching the clip title. For example, if you search 'curry 3' ('curry three' returns nothing), it'll return things like "Curry 2' Finger Roll Layup (6 PTS) (Iguodala 3 AST)" or "Curry REBOUND (Off:0 Def:3)". If it could match the search query with play-by-play data, now THAT'd be cool.

eaganr 10y ago
My site (http://eaganr.com/nba/ http://eaganr.com/nba/) used to do this. But they changed up their video URLs, wondering how Matetricks gets the new URLs.
- Matetricks 10y ago
  I didn't build this, it's a site that's been trending on my news feed. Two people in my network built it over a weekend.
  - mistermann 10y ago
    I would tell those 2 guys to build this out including parts that should be there but they need the data, etc, targeting it as a value-add service that Disney can sell to ESPN subscribers. Done properly with multiple sports over multiple years and consistent annotations, I would think sports fans would go nuts over this, wouldn't they? (Any sports fans here?) Like, think of the ability to jump immediately to the video of most any noteworthy event in a sports event in recent history - "hey, remember that time PlayerX did that funny fake tag out to PlayerY? Hey let's pull that up and watch it, grab this slider you can move it back and forth to see exactly how he pulled off that trick, hahaha awesome". I think Disney has plenty enough in-house talent and they're usually pretty forward thinking, it's surprising they haven't done something along these lines.
    - kareemm 10y ago
      I used to work at ESPN.com. My job application was a proof of concept of a similar idea, but because it was 2002 and wasn't possible to build technically it was designed to show that I could code and think creatively about consuming sports online. When I took the job, the realities of licensing footage hot hard: the leagues were not keen on letting a third party like ESPN have historical, searchable footage like this available on demand. The leagues were still figuring not how to make money from digital and rights to their games are the biggest asset they have. Things have changed since then but the tl; dr is that from 2002-2005 the reason this wasn't built by ESPN was not technical or due to a lack of imagination, but a business reason - it was prohibitively expensive / impossible to get licensing rights from the leagues.

djKianoosh 10y ago

cool stuff... every letter search becomes a new route.. yikes that is awful for going back also, I searched for ginobili assist but it found all plays with ginobili and any assist. good start and the video quality is pretty strong on mobile

derimagia 10y ago

For all the people asking where it's from, quick google brought up http://www.nba.com/sitemap_videos_0001.xml http://www.nba.com/sitemap_videos_0001.xml and changing it to 0002 seemed to work. It's just an index of something from nba.com and nothing is hosted on the site.

shaunpud 10y ago
You can get all the sitemaps here; http://www.nba.com/video_sitemap_index.xml http://www.nba.com/video_sitemap_index.xml
- nlin5 10y ago
  How were you able to find that sitemap? Is there one for stats.nba.com?
  - shaunpud 10y ago
    Not sure mate, but you can find a bunch through G; https://www.google.com.au/search?q=inurl%3Axml+site%3Anba.com https://www.google.com.au/search?q=inurl%3Axml+site%3Anba.co...

failedstoic 10y ago

How I can find who made this? Would love to work w/ him/her on a project.

krrishd 10y ago
http://twitter.com/canzhiye http://twitter.com/canzhiye
- DanFeldman 10y ago
  And by Zhi P
14sbhargava 10y ago
also @notzhipan

rfrank 10y ago

I like the idea, but I'm having some trouble with it. Search results are only from this season, right? A search for Steve Nash showed a Steph Currey highlight as result one for me. More slang oriented searches like "dunked on" or "dunks on" don't really work either. Dunk/Dunks shows up in results, but nothing beyond that. Was looking for one of my all time favorite highlights, Baron Davis dunking on Kirilenko [1]. For me this type of thing would be pretty awesome with some sort of stats element. A 'visual box score' vs. 'highlights search engine.' ie show the box score for a game, and clicking in any particular field shows video of the plays that produced those stats. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYpwjB0IzoU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYpwjB0IzoU

microtherion 10y ago
> A search for Steve Nash showed a Steph Currey highlight as result one for me Presumably because Nash is on the warriors coaching staff.
- rfrank 10y ago
  I can't find any retired players, maybe you can. Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, etc. Pretty sure it's just this year for results.
  - microtherion 10y ago
    I'm sure you're right, just meant to explain the connection between Nash & Curry.

LAMike 10y ago

Searched for "Kobe pass" 0 results lol

rfrank 10y ago
Would be pretty hilarious if the only result was the 81 point game.

prawn 10y ago

Would be great if it could learn which were most likely to be highlight plays based on the number of times they were clicked. And then give those priority in the results list. Also, maybe prioritise a player's involvement in the play. e.g., if I search "westbrook dunk", I probably don't want the normal dunks first, or the time he passed to someone else who then had the dunk. Show me the great Westbrook dunks first, then the normal ones, then the assists to other dunkers.

esturk 10y ago

Typed in "5x5", found nothing. However rare of a performance, Draymond pulled it off last season so it should be relatively recent.

m_myers 10y ago
This site appears to only have clips of individual plays, so neither a 5x5 nor a triple double would appear except as a long set of highlights. And not every play is a highlight; I checked a recent Russell Westbrook game and it had every assist but only about half of his scoring plays.

nodesocket 10y ago

I can't say for sure this is what 3ball is using, but here is an XML file from NBA.com listing videos with associated titles, descriptions, thmbnails, and video urls. http://www.nba.com/sitemap_videos_0001.xml http://www.nba.com/sitemap_videos_0001.xml However it appears outdated since the dates only go up to 8/4/2016.

laxatives 10y ago

I tried like 8 queries and none of them yielded a single relevant result. Most of them didn't yield a video at all. Granted, they were difficult/obscure, but didn't make a great impression. If this needs some special syntax or keywords, you should let the user know.

orthoganol 10y ago

"All NBA Plays"? For example, this well circulated failed dunk attempt by Curry from earlier this season is not there: https://streamable.com/mntc https://streamable.com/mntc

alwayseasy 10y ago
Found it. The queries have to match the naming of the video so I searched "Miss Curry Lakers": https://3ball.io/miss-curry-lakers/0021600238_233 https://3ball.io/miss-curry-lakers/0021600238_233
rockostrich 10y ago
It seems like it only included plays that create stats for players (with the occasional "missed" play). For example, for the Knicks-Kings game Brandon Jennings's half court and-one that was disallowed (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmzQS5XxkOs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmzQS5XxkOs) doesn't show up either.

pmontra 10y ago

If you search for a player's name and the word pass you get all the videos with that player and that word in the title. That includes the ones where the pass was made by somebody else and the ones marked as bad pass, which are probably not what I'm interested in. A suggestion: limit the search to the substring of the title between commas. It seems to always match a player with his play.